What a difference there was between this and an earlier age! The really sceptical pagan was King Agrippa, who wished to hear St. Paul merely out of curiosity.[1] He listened to him, disputed with him, took him for a madman, but did not dream of punishing him for thinking differently from himself. Another example is the historian Tacitus, who was full of contempt for the new sectaries, but blamed Nero for his cruelty in persecuting them. Agrippa and Tacitus were the real unbelievers. Diocletian was a politician ruled by the clamours of his people ; Decius and Aurelian were fanatics like their subjects.
Even when the Roman Government had definitely gone over to Christianity, what a task it was to bring the different peoples into the bosom of the Church! In Greece there was a series of terrible struggles, in the Universities as well as in the small towns and villages. The bishops had everywhere such difficulty in ousting the little local divinities that very often the victory was due less to argument and conversion than to time, patience, and diplomacy. The clergy were forced to make use of pious frauds, and their ingenuity replaced the deities of wood, meadow, and fountain, by saints, martyrs, and virgins. Thus the feelings of reverence continued without a break ; for some time they were directed to the wrong objects, but they at last found the right road. . . . But what am I saying ? Can we be so certain that even in France there are not to be found to this day a few places where the tenacity of some odd superstition still gives trouble to the parish priest ? In Catholic Brittany, in the eighteenth century, a bishop had a long struggle with a village-people that clung to the worship of a stone idol. In vain was the gross image thrown into the water ; its fanatical admirers always fished it out again, and the help of a company of infantry was needed to break it to pieces. We see from this what a long life paganism had — and still has. I conclude that there is no good reason for holding that Rome and Athens were for a single day without religion.
Since then, a nation has never, either in ancient or modern
- ↑ Acts xxvi, 24, 28, 31.
